A car phone is a mobile radio telephone specifically designed for and fitted into an automobile. This service originated with the Bell System and was first used in St. Louis, Missouri, United States on June 17, 1946.
A car phone is a mobile radio telephone specifically designed for and fitted into an automobile. This service originated with the Bell System and was first used in St. Louis, Missouri, United States on June 17, 1946.
The original equipment weighed 80 pounds (36 kg), and there were initially only 3 channels for all the users in the metropolitan area. Later, more licenses were added, bringing the total to 32 channels across 3 bands (See IMTS frequencies). This service was used at least into the 1980s in large portions of North America. [1]
On October 2, 1946, Motorola communications equipment carried the first calls on Illinois Bell Telephone Company's new car radiotelephone service in Chicago. [2] [3] Due to the small number of radio frequencies available, the service quickly reached capacity.
In Finland, car phone service was first available in 1971 on the zero generation ARP (Autoradiopuhelin, or Car Radiophone) service. This was succeeded in 1982 by the 1G system NMT (Nordic Mobile Telephone), used across Scandinavia and in other often remote areas.
In West Germany, the car phone service was first released in 1958 as the A-Netz service. In 1971, it reached its capacity limit of almost 11,000 subscribers and was succeeded by B-Netz in 1972, which featured direct dialling, not requiring a human operator to connect calls. However, in order to reach a subscriber, one would still need to know their location since the handset would assume the local area code of the base station serving it. It was succeeded in 1985 by the C-Netz 1G system.
In North America, car phones typically used the Mobile Telephone Service (MTS), which was first used in St. Louis, or Improved Mobile Telephone Service (IMTS) before giving way to analog cellular service (AMPS) in 1984. AMPS technology was discontinued in the United States in 2008. [4]
Since a traditional car phone uses a high-power transmitter and external antenna, it is ideal for rural or undeveloped areas where mobile handsets may not work well or at all. However, due to current US Federal Communications Commission regulations, carriers must pay penalties for activating any equipment that is not an E911 compliant device, such as analog.[ citation needed ]
In the 1980s, the car phone was more popular than the mobile phone. However, as mobile phones became lighter and more affordable during the mobile phone boom in the 1990s, car phones became less common. By the 2000s, car phones had become uncommon due to the convenience of mobile phones along with in-car mobile phone integrative technologies such as Bluetooth.
There were still some car phones available as recently as 2008, including the Nokia 810 and the Motorola VC6096 for use with GSM networks and a car phone made by NAL Research for the Iridium satellite network. Motorola provided US customers with the m800 and m900 car phones, for use with CDMA and GSM networks respectively. Some car phones had colour screens and supported high-speed data connections as well as the ability to access SIM cards stored in other phones via Bluetooth.
Since 2008, many automobiles have featured integrated, "hands-free" systems to utilize a consumer's mobile phone, via a Bluetooth wireless link or use an integrated transceiver. The systems use an internally mounted microphone, and the car's audio system, and may feature voice activation and control. [5] [6]
Advanced Mobile Phone System (AMPS) was an analog mobile phone system standard originally developed by Bell Labs and later modified in a cooperative effort between Bell Labs and Motorola. It was officially introduced in the Americas on October 13, 1983, and was deployed in many other countries too, including Israel in 1986, Australia in 1987, Singapore in 1988, and Pakistan in 1990. It was the primary analog mobile phone system in North America through the 1980s and into the 2000s. As of February 18, 2008, carriers in the United States were no longer required to support AMPS and companies such as AT&T and Verizon Communications have discontinued this service permanently. AMPS was discontinued in Australia in September 2000, in Pakistan by October 2004, in Israel by January 2010, and Brazil by 2010.
Motorola, Inc. was an American multinational telecommunications company based in Schaumburg, Illinois. It was founded in 1928 as Galvin Manufacturing Corporation by brothers Paul and Joseph Galvin. The company changed its name to Motorola in 1947. After having lost $4.3 billion from 2007 to 2009, Motorola was split into two independent public companies, Motorola Mobility and Motorola Solutions, on January 4, 2011. The reorganization was structured with Motorola Solutions legally succeeding Motorola, Inc., and Motorola Mobility being spun off.
The Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS) is a third generation mobile cellular system for networks based on the GSM standard. Developed and maintained by the 3GPP, UMTS is a component of the International Telecommunication Union IMT-2000 standard set and compares with the CDMA2000 standard set for networks based on the competing cdmaOne technology. UMTS uses wideband code-division multiple access (W-CDMA) radio access technology to offer greater spectral efficiency and bandwidth to mobile network operators.
Integrated Digital Enhanced Network (iDEN) is a mobile telecommunications technology, developed by Motorola, which provides its users the benefits of a trunked radio and a cellular telephone. It was called the first mobile social network by many technology industry analysts. iDEN places more users in a given spectral space, compared to analog cellular and two-way radio systems, by using speech compression and time-division multiple access (TDMA).
IS-54 and IS-136 are second-generation (2G) mobile phone systems, known as Digital AMPS (D-AMPS), and most often referred to as TDMA, are a further development of the North American 1G mobile system Advanced Mobile Phone System (AMPS). It was once prevalent throughout the Americas, particularly in the United States and Canada since the first commercial network was deployed in 1993. D-AMPS is considered end-of-life, and existing networks have mostly been replaced by GSM/GPRS or CDMA2000 technologies.
A cellular network or mobile network is a telecommunications network where the link to and from end nodes is wireless and the network is distributed over land areas called cells, each served by at least one fixed-location transceiver. These base stations provide the cell with the network coverage which can be used for transmission of voice, data, and other types of content. A cell typically uses a different set of frequencies from neighboring cells, to avoid interference and provide guaranteed service quality within each cell.
A cordless telephone or portable telephone has a portable telephone handset that connects by radio to a base station connected to the public telephone network. The operational range is limited, usually to the same building or within some short distance from the base station.
The Improved Mobile Telephone Service (IMTS) was a pre-cellular VHF/UHF radio system which linked to the public telephone network. IMTS was the radiotelephone equivalent of land dial phone service. Introduced in 1964, it replaced Mobile Telephone Service (MTS) and improved on most MTS systems by offering direct-dial rather than connections through a live operator, and full-duplex operation so both parties could talk at the same time.
GSM frequency bands or frequency ranges are the cellular frequencies designated by the ITU for the operation of GSM mobile phones and other mobile devices.
Mobile telephony is the provision of telephone services to mobile phones rather than fixed-location phones. Telephony is supposed to specifically point to a voice-only service or connection, though sometimes the line may blur.
1G refers to the first generation of cellular network (wireless) technology. These are mobile telecommunications standards that were introduced in the 1980s and were superseded by 2G. The main difference between these two mobile cellular generations is that the audio transmissions of 1G networks were analog, while 2G networks were entirely digital.
Mobile radio telephone systems were mobile telephony systems that preceded modern cellular network technology. Since they were the predecessors of the first generation of cellular telephones, these systems are sometimes retroactively referred to as pre-cellular systems. Technologies used in pre-cellular systems included the Push to Talk, Mobile Telephone Service (MTS), Improved Mobile Telephone Service (IMTS), and Advanced Mobile Telephone System (AMTS) systems. These early mobile telephone systems can be distinguished from earlier closed radiotelephone systems in that they were available as a commercial service that was part of the public switched telephone network, with their own telephone numbers, rather than part of a closed network such as a police radio or taxi dispatching system.
The history of mobile phones covers mobile communication devices that connect wirelessly to the public switched telephone network.
The DynaTAC is a series of cellular telephones manufactured by Motorola from 1983 to 1994. The Motorola DynaTAC 8000X received approval from the U.S. FCC on September 21, 1983. A full charge took roughly 10 hours, and it offered 30 minutes of talk time. It also offered an LED display for dialing or recall of one of 30 phone numbers. It was priced at $3,995 in 1984, its commercial release year, equivalent to $11,253 in 2022. DynaTAC was an abbreviation of "Dynamic Adaptive Total Area Coverage".
A mobile phone operator, wireless provider, or carrier is a mobile telecommunications company that provides wireless Internet GSM services for mobile device users. The operator gives a SIM card to the customer who inserts it into the mobile device to gain access to the service.
The Motorola StarTAC, first released on January 3, 1996, is often assumed to be the first ever clamshell (flip) mobile phone. Technically, however, NEC had been releasing flip phones on NTT Docomo's PDC Mova network long before 1996, namely the TZ-804 and TZ-1501, both respectively launched in 1991 and late 1994. Another early precursor of this form factor was the Grillo, which was designed in Italy by Richard Sapper and Marco Zanuso in 1965. The StarTAC is the successor of the MicroTAC, a semi-clamshell design first launched in 1989. Whereas the MicroTAC's flip folded down from below the keypad, the StarTAC folded up from above the display. In 2005, PC World named the StarTAC as the 6th Greatest Gadget of the Past 50 Years. The StarTAC was among the first mobile phones to gain widespread consumer adoption; approximately 60 million StarTACs were sold.
Wi-Fi calling refers to mobile phone voice calls and data that are made over IP networks using Wi-Fi, instead of the cell towers provided by cellular networks. Using this feature, compatible handsets are able to route regular cellular calls through a wireless LAN (Wi-Fi) network with broadband Internet, while seamlessly change connections between the two where necessary. This feature makes use of the Generic Access Network (GAN) protocol, also known as Unlicensed Mobile Access (UMA).
The Radio Telephone Network C, was a first generation analog cellular phone system deployed and operated in Germany by DeTeMobil. It utilized the C-450 standard, originally developed by Siemens AG, and was the third and last update of a series of analog mobile phone systems used primarily within Germany, superseding the B-Netz and the A-Netz before it. It has been decommissioned, replaced by both the newer D-Netz and E-Netz systems, both based on GSM standards and operating on 900 MHz and 1800 MHz bands respectively.
The Motorola bag phone is the colloquial name for a line of personal transportable cellular telephones manufactured by Motorola, inc. from 1988 to 2000.
A mobile phone is a portable telephone that can make and receive calls over a radio frequency link while the user is moving within a telephone service area, as opposed to a fixed-location phone. The radio frequency link establishes a connection to the switching systems of a mobile phone operator, which provides access to the public switched telephone network (PSTN). Modern mobile telephone services use a cellular network architecture and therefore mobile telephones are called cellphones in North America. In addition to telephony, digital mobile phones support a variety of other services, such as text messaging, multimedia messaging, email, Internet access, short-range wireless communications, satellite access, business applications, payments, multimedia playback and streaming, digital photography, and video games. Mobile phones offering only basic capabilities are known as feature phones ; mobile phones which offer greatly advanced computing capabilities are referred to as smartphones.
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